...the history of Ireland as Disney would “imagineer” it: the past as a preindustrial idyll full of familiar, entertaining, and edifying scenery—with anything that might offend or trouble painstakingly excised. There are no paintings of Cromwell’s butchery at Drogheda or reenactments of the Great Potato Famine here; indeed nothing in Fadò explicitly indicates that for eight centuries Éire was occupied and often brutally exploited by the hated Saxon. None of that bummer blarney! The prime mover behind the bar is Guinness Brewing—which is in fact a British company, part of the London-based conglomerate Diageo, which also owns Burger King, Pillsbury, and United Distillers & Vintners—so it probably sees little advantage in exhuming such unpleasant facts.

In the last 15 years, Dublin-based IPCo and its competitors have fabricated and installed more than 1,800 watering holes in more than 50 countries. Guinness threw its weight (and that of its global parent Diageo) behind the movement, and an industry was built around the reproduction of "Irishness" on every continent—and even in Ireland itself. IPCo has built 40 ersatz pubs on the Emerald Isle, opening them beside the long-standing establishments on which they were based.

You live in New Zealand. You are into urban design. Then you should be keeping up with Eye of the Fish, fearless critics of planning disasters and architectural crimes.

There are many fine apartment buildings in Wellington as of late, designed by architects with care and a sense of proportion, making our inner city streets interesting with carefully thought out facades and a varied use of materiality. But in Oriental Bay, we seem to be seeing more of the opposite. Appalling developments with untold more money than taste, resulting in deathly dullness from Donald Design. The street frontage is inevitably just converted into an endless series of tedious garage doors and blanked off panels, enclosing the inevitable plethora of high-end SUVs within.

Drench: a form of the English drink, but used in a peculiar sense in Ireland. A drench is a philtre, a love-potion, a love-compelling drink over which certain charms were repeated during its preparation. Made by boiling certain herbs (orchis) in water or milk, and the person drinks it unsuspectingly. In my boyhood time a beautiful young girl belonging to a most respectable family ran off with an ill-favoured obscure beggarly diseased wretch. The occurrence was looked on with great astonishment and horror by the people—no wonder; and the universal belief was that the fellow's old mother had given the poor girl a drench. To this hour I cannot make any guess at the cause of that astounding elopement.

Even though most of my co-workers are sociable, most of them are men. And now I learn the association of men, nerdery and computing is not the natural order of things: it is the outcome of deliberate policy in the 1960s. (Thanks to Aurynn on Twitter for the link).

At the same time, new hiring tools—including tools that were seemingly objective—had the unintended result of making the programming profession harder for women to enter. Eager to identify talented individuals to train as computer programmers, employers relied on aptitude tests to make hiring decisions. With their focus on mathematical puzzle-solving, the tests may have favored men, who were more likely to take math classes in school. More critically, the tests were widely compromised and their answers were available for study through all-male networks such as college fraternities and Elks lodges.

According to Ensmenger, a second type of test, the personality profile, was even more slanted to male applicants. Based on a series of preference questions, these tests sought to indentify job applicants who were the ideal programming “type.” According to test developers, successful programmers had most of the same personality traits as other white-collar professionals. The important distinction, however, was that programmers displayed “disinterest in people” and that they disliked “activities involving close personal interaction.” It is these personality profiles, says Ensmenger, that originated our modern stereotype of the anti-social computer geek.

...not all Dunedin student flats are rundown dives and there are many modern or renovated places on the rental market. But it is the older “character” buildings that tend to attract names. Many include subtle, or not so subtle, sexual references, such as the Cock and Swallow, while some refer to drinking exploits, such as the DSIR (Department of Student Inebriation Research). Others are more cultural or esoteric in origin. Pink Flat The Door at 3 Clyde Street, named in 1988 by a group of students including broadcaster Wallace Chapman, was a “freedom flat” inspired by Skinner’s philosophy of a free society. The door design refers to Pink Floyd’s classic album The Wall. Some names reflect the history of the building. From the late 1990s comes Bruce’s Beenjamin’ Butchery, located at 15 Ethel Benjamin Place and clearly visible from State Highway 1. The house used to be a butcher’s shop, and Bruce was the landlord. Others reflect the identity of the flatmates. The house at 40 Dundas Street, once upon a time known as the Greasy Beaver Lodge, has recently become the Embassy, complete with Samoan flag.

Robyn Gallagher, surely a pioneer of NZ online writing, notes that blogging isn't what it was. I have no idea if Robyn and Sarah are related.

Vice Magazine. As is so often the case with the seemingly edgy and subversive, Vice is a business which is just as much part of the structure of power and capital as everything else. The Integrated Rape Joke

... the illicit voyeurism that ended News of the World would remain standard operating procedure for the Murdoch machine. The entertainment division would simply do so with more hipster cred—5 percent of “edgy” Vice Media, in fact, which Murdoch took home for a cool $70 million in August 2013.

Why do female comedians always talk about their periods? We don’t. I haven’t done a period joke since the one I wrote in 1994 about Paul McCartney. Comedians talk about what we know, and write about the idea that is making the most noise in our head which insists on being turned into a gag. I haven’t been inspired to write about periods since I had my uterus removed in 2003. Thanks for asking. But in defence of a good period joke, let me paraphrase something another comic once said: If Chris Rock bled out of his penis 5 days out of every 28, he’d probably mention it on stage.